Why It Feels like Life Speeds up as You Get Older

“The acceleration of time is the result of our increasing tendency through life to package distinct experiences into bigger ‘chunks.’ For example, for a child, a walk in the park can involve so many new experiences — their first sighting of flowers covered in snow, perhaps, or of a scary dog — that each are remembered as distinct individual events. For the adult accompanying that child, if nothing novel happens, all the varied sensations and impressions associated with that walk may be collapsed — or ‘chunked’ — into a single memory of ‘a walk in the park.’”

It seems like time moves faster every year, but research has found there may be a reason for that — and something we can do to slow down the sensation.

It turns out people who make an effort to live in the moment and avoid grouping experiences such as their “commute,” “work,” or “family time” together in their own mind tend to experience the passage of time more slowly than those that don’t.

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